Diicot

The Honeypot-Detection Arms Race: Three Tiers of Checks Attackers Run Before They Trust Your Shell

Before they drop a payload, the better SSH botnets now ask whether they're standing in a honeypot. We captured three escalating tiers of that check on our sensors — from commodity CPU-core counting, to a seven-step environment-integrity routine, to a deep /proc-entropy and PID-reality battery we cannot find published anywhere. In every case the operator ran the checks and then proceeded to the payload. That last fact is the point.